The ongoing crisis in mainstream economics has opened the door to recognition of true uncertainty. Economists are increasingly embracing uncertainty and tracing its implications for responsible economic practice and policy design that foregrounds rather than dismisses the limits to knowledge. Protean Power (PP) promotes a similar shift in international relations. PP advances a key distinction between operational and radical uncertainty. We argue that a complementary and perhaps more productive way to theorize the epistemic insufficiency facing agents as they map and implement strategies is to distinguish between ‘reparable’ and ‘irreparable’ ignorance, which leads to ‘Hirschmanian’ pragmatism.

This paper probes the attempt to use power analysis to link three domains: ontology, explanation, and the strategy of political actors. It shows how Katzenstein and Seybert develop an open social ontology that serves as the backdrop for explanations that need to be causal but indeterminate, and a cautious political practice. It exposes tensions in two important links. First, the open ontology becomes retranslated as an explanatory cause. Second, the call for being cautious because of ‘unknown unknowns’ may just as well invite strategies of doubling down in control power.

This article scrutinizes two concepts central to the ontological security framework, agency and anxiety. Its point of departure is the view that conceptions of agency are expressed in the attempt to become ontologically secure, which requires a more careful look at how humans try to satisfy the need for a ‘stable sense of Self’ by putting in place ‘anxiety controlling mechanisms’. This, in turn, raises the question what these mechanisms are supposed to control, which shifts attention to the concept of ‘anxiety’. Going back to Kierkegaard's original treatment and Heidegger's existential phenomenology, the article reviews the emergence of anxiety as a core feature of the human condition and highlights what it calls the ‘anxiety paradox’: the tendency of reflexive humans facing the freedom of being in time to attach themselves to constructs that provide a sense of temporal continuity, or certainty. The article argues that the existing ontological security literature is trapped in this paradox and therefore cannot account for radical forms of agency.

This contribution argues that the concept of protean power opens a space to think about the limits of control and knowledge about catastrophic possibilities such as nuclear war. To do so, it offers the first distinctive definition of nuclear luck, which has long been acknowledged by policy and military leaders but remains unaccounted for in scholarship. It further shows that the nuclear realm is defined by two key unknowables. However, it argues that protean power perpetuates a survivability bias which has characterized scholarship so far, before suggesting ways to overcome that bias and modify scholarly ethos to acknowledge such catastrophic possibilities.

This paper analyzes the idea of ‘ontological security’ to make three arguments: (a) that to be secure in one's being is paradoxical in the sense that to be is to survive while always becoming otherwise, (b) that to survive is to be anxious, and (c) that to get attached to such a security of one's always becoming otherwise is to engage in performative leaps of faith in the security of one's existence. This framework is used to suggest a new interpretation of the security dilemma.

The omnipresence of radical uncertainty asks for a concept of causality that moves beyond the notion of predicted probabilities. Protean power is a most important contribution to move International Relations research in this direction. Yet, some of the key components need further grounding in existing concepts and debates. First, protean power should include the notion of directionality in order to be power. Second, it should allow for an analysis of the different forms of relation between protean power and different types of uncertainties. And it should focus on features of the power relationship instead of the context in which it takes place to be able to transfer it to contexts other than uncertainty.

When ontological insecurity looms, what comes next? Is chaos the sole alternative to the maintenance of established role-identities and routines? Or is there a more complex set of possible responses to the dread threat of ontological insecurity? The principal approach to ontological security in International Relations (IR) relies unduly on Giddens' account. Consequently, this approach fails to adequately capture both the variety of ways in which coherent and continuous identities can be maintained and the variety of ways in which the available cultural repertoire can support ontological security differently when challenged. Typically, ontological security is re-established, prior to collapse, through re-balancing of the cultural repertoire to give broader scope to an alternative cultural form and the qualitatively different practices it organizes. Due to misrecognition, this reorganization may proceed without disturbing the ontological security of states-in-interaction. Unconscious processes, encoded into cultural forms, are integral to such variable defenses against ontological insecurity. A re-conceptualization that regards Wendt's cultures of anarchy, and their qualitatively different modes of relating, as dynamically co-present within cultural repertoires, but with potentially variable weightings, complements this approach to ontological in/security.

This paper restates the central point of Protean Power, pushes the analysis forward by engaging each of the commentators, and concludes by underlining the importance of uncertainty and potentialities and mapping some of the areas that need further attention.

In this article, we begin to extend ontological security to third-image theorizing. We argue that the autobiographical conceptions of international agents, along with other stories told about international politics, constitute ‘the international’ as a system, society, community, or inhabitable realm beyond and between first- and second-image relations. To develop this point, we focus on the relationship between narrative, anxiety, and time. We contend that ontological security issues resound in the third image once we shift from treating the international realm as social agents' external environment to treating it as a collective project in its own right. Doing so highlights the promise of ontological security studies for further differentiating international fear and anxiety, for enabling novel explanations of international phenomena, and for elaborating third-image identity formation as a wide-ranging timing effort to surmount a dynamic, processual environment full of interconnected coordination challenges.